Category: English

Photo: Getty Facebook is sponsoring the efforts of former Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney campaign managers to combat hacking and disinformation campaigns designed to interfere with elections. Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos announced the company’s $500,000 investment in the effort, called Defending Digital Democracy, today during a keynote at the security conference Black Hat.…

Snapshot of burst via S.Karpov, G.Beskin (SAO RAS and Kazan Federal University, Russia), S.Bondar, E.Ivanov, E.Katkova, N.Orekhova, A.Perkov (OJS RPC PSI, Russia), A.Biryukov (SAI MSU and Kazan Federal University, Russia), V.Sasyuk (Kazan Federal University, Russia) On June 25, 2016 at 6pm ET, a flash of visible light appeared in the sky that, depending on your…

Photo: Getty The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is being sued over its failure to adhere to a federal transparency law and for wrongfully withholding agency records about net neutrality from the public. American Oversight, a legal watchdog group formed this year to expose conflicts and fraud in the Trump’s administration’s executive departments, filed a lawsuit…

Photo: Getty Emus are big, fluffy, flightless birds indigenous only to Australia. They are also the biggest dufuses in the animal kingdom, and are constantly getting themselves caught up in all sorts of tomfoolery, which is documented in obscure subreddits. Now, Australian researchers at Monash University might have found another reason to love these giant…

Photo: Getty Less than a week ago, headlines declared that a market-shaking fork in Bitcoin had been averted. But the people backing a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash have now announced that the expected compromise between warring factions is dead. Next week, the huge Bitcoin fork will begin, and here’s what it’s all about. $37…

Credit: Disney Research and Caltech In order to build a dataset of millions of facial landmarks to feed into a neural network, researchers used infrared cameras to film the audiences of 150 showings of nine movies, including recent Disney films Star Wars: The Force Awaken, Zootopia, Inside Out, and Big Hero 6. The resulting AI…

Image: Ferg Horne/Associated Press Well here’s something you don’t see everyday—wild rabbits riding on the backs of sheep to flee rising floodwaters. The remarkable scene was captured by a New Zealand farmer who said he’s never witnessed anything quite like it. As reported in the Associated Press, the event was captured by Ferg Horne, 64,…

Genetically engineered ‘blue’ chrysanthemums. Credit: Science Advances In nature, blue is much rarer than you might think. Sure, the sky is blue when the weather’s nice, and so is the ocean. But the vast majority of plants and animals are incapable of making blue pigment. Brilliantly-colored peacocks appear blue not because their feathers are colored…

Video still: Jeff Bezos/Instagram Commercial space tourism company Blue Origin, and its overlord Jeff Bezos, have been pretty quiet over the last few months. But last week, the Amazon founder made his first Instagram post, which appears to show the billionaire stranded on the roof of his own rocket facility in Florida. Because he is…

LONDON – The parents of the very ill baby Charlie Gard to Thursday 12.00 (13.00 Dutch time) and the time got to be with the doctors to reach an agreement about where the child should die. That the court in London Wednesday determined. The two parties are not out, then the child must be transferred…